Posts Tagged ‘Graphics Design’

Took ya long enough!

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got a new theme up on k.nu. The previous one was nice and all but I needed a change. I was waiting on inspiration, and oddly enough I got it from a damn game on my Tablet.  There’s a game called “Fashion Story” that I’m absolutely sick of playing but the color scheme for the game itself inspired me. When I showed it to Adam he said “OOH SUPER CUTE” and I told him to build something for me. He sent me a PSD with a base template, I added to it and went crazy with little tweaks and mods here and there and BOOM = New Template!

I mirrors templates that I’d done in the past. Everyone now, sticking with HTML5/CSS is going for the centered layouts with muted, but bold, colors. I wanted something completely different. There was a theme I created when I was on dork.com (over 10 years ago) that really reminded me of the theme that Adam started for me. Back then my coding skills were no where near what they are now, I think I tried to figure out what DIV tags were for that template because I’d previously used Tables and multiple frames to get everything to load. God, do you remember coding with FRAMES, that had to be the absolute WORST way to build a damn website – but no one knew any better, they just wanted to get as much information as possible onto a single page and that was the only way to do it.

I’m actually very happy that I was able to get this up and running. I know it’s not an extravagant WOW type of template, but I’m happy with it and that’s what matters.  I’ve been so busy working on numerous other things that having the downtime to get it done is really what mattered to me.  I started putzing around with it about a month ago, and was able to put the final touches on it for the last few days. I’d finished up a site that I was working on with Adam (for Kimberly J. Brown – remember her from Halloweentown?).  The site itself is ready to go in a Development folder we’re just waiting on the GreenLight to go live with it. It’s a fantastic change from the design she was previously using. It’s more hip, modern, and not located on blogger. This chick has been fully upgraded to WordPress and I’m hoping she’s super happy with the site.

My issue now is I’m at a ‘low point’ with work. So this means I’ll be working on random odd-and-end jobs to help Sean out, but I don’t have anything to personally handle on my own.  I know I’m helping him out with a site tomorrow, but then I’m jumping onto the total revamp of AGn Designs, it’s in desperate need of a facelift and I have quite a few sites to add to the portfolio.  It really sucks that I have so many NDA’s with clients, there were numerous sites that I’ve worked on that I’ve been so proud of but don’t have the ability to list them in my portfolio. One day I’ll get those kinds of sites for my own doing so I can joyfully display them, but for now I’ll just keep chugging away.

I do know that my usual boss has about 6 sites to send to me, but he’s been so damn busy with everything going on that they’re delayed at the moment.  I just hope that all of the sites he claims are coming to me aren’t going to show up mid-month in August. Our friend Colin is coming down to visit for 5 days and I really don’t want to be working the whole time he’s here. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and I already have a lot of stuff planned for us. Working would completely cut into that.

The upside to today, other than completing this, is I was able to get outside for a little while and do some much needed lawn maintenance. It’s been so long since I weed-wacked that I couldn’t even see where the bushes began and the grass ended. The grass grew straight up and over all of the trim/separators we have outside. I wacked that down straight to the dirt so I know I’ll have a few more weeks before I need to get out there again. Grass grows so damn quickly this time of year, I hate it. I wish I had a gravel yard … less maintenance.

The second upside – I found a site that makes all kinds of custom stuff for your business. It’s not vista-print – I effin’ hate them. It’s a newer site called BuildASign.com. I ordered a custom license plate, because Delaware is one of those states where you only need to have one plate on the car, so I’m utilizing the real estate that my car actually has (meaning lack of outside decoration) and I got myself a plate with AGn Designs logo printed on it. I did have to partially cancel my order with them because I chose the wrong size window decals – they were way too small for the amount of information that I actually put onto it. That was completely my fault, I know I was paying attention when I was setting everything up but I honestly didn’t even think about it being too small until my Mom had mentioned “Really, 3×5?”.  So now I’m working on getting everything larger so it’s easier to read.  The license plate should be here by the 15th. Hopefully today I’ll be ordering the larger sized decals and have them around the 15th/16th as well.

Anyone interested in a free AGn Designs window decal? I can offer free advertising to anyone interested in pasting it onto their car to aid me in a little free advertising as well.  Shoot me an email through the Contact page if you’re interested.

In any event, it’s knocking on 6am and I have an inbox to clear out so I can get some shut-eye.

Let the chaos begin…

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

I’m not someone who’s easily overwhelmed by ANYTHING. The past hour, however, has set my head into such a spin that I feel like I’m dealing with some type of internal tornado.

I’ve been working for a design firm in Manhattan for quite some time now, Sean actually was the one to get me the job with one of the company owners to work on one of their websites and from there was bounced to the other owner who’s the #1 on the Web department. It’s been steady on-going work, primarily in WordPress and after the last year and a half I’m utilizing areas of WordPress that I didn’t even think existed in this world. The way things are morphed and hacked (without physically touching the core files) blows my fricken mind. I don’t think I’ve done one site that didn’t require heavily modified template files to cater to custom posts and custom fields. The repeater field on Advanced Custom Fields just about made my head explode when I was finally able to figure out the ins and outs of it.

All that aside, obviously I’ve been able to keep myself busy with a lot of things to do, the thing that’s kicking my ass right now is the fact that there’s 4 sites that basically need to be done by Wednesday (just for this company) and I have no idea how to wrap my head around the amount of work that needs to be accomplished. I’m not against working a 16-20 hour day in order to get everything done, don’t get me wrong, but the issue now is the fact that I’m needing to figure out how to do this while still sitting in the cancer center on Monday and Tuesday for Karen’s chemo. She did OK for the first cycle (3 weeks ago), she had the typical side effects of nausea, headaches, vomiting but it subsided after a few days and she’s been pretty comfortable since. The woman is eating her weight in food on a daily basis and her newest addiction is potatoes and corn because she’s carbo-loading like a best thanks to the Steroids. Her recent discussion with her doctor, and the fact that she had a very strange reaction with the first cycle (almost immediately) now has her on the path to receiving a different type of Chemo that needs to be administered over the course of two days instead of the one. So on Monday morning and Tuesday morning someone needs to accompany her to the cancer center so she’s got someone with her for the 5 or so hours it takes to get her treatment. Now, if things were a little slower it wouldn’t be an issue at all but having such tight deadlines for four massive sites… I don’t know how I’m going to be able to accomplish it all.

I just really hope that the cancer center doesn’t have restrictions on their WiFi. I don’t mind switching back over to my laptop to get in a few hours of work while I’m there, but the last time I tried to work in a hospital I was quickly shut down because they don’t allow uploading on their network, and it’s not exactly possible to connect to FTP when that’s the case. Sean and I had a shit-ton of bad luck when we were at Johns Hopkins (main hospital for 5 days back in July) because of the restrictions, and we didn’t actually have a hotel room to go back to until 2 1/2 days after we got up to Baltimore so we lost a lot of time on our punch cards in order to deal with everything going on there. We didn’t try it while Karen was in Hopkins (Bayview – for two weeks in September) because we bounced back and forth from the hospital to the hotel multiple times a day and were able to utilize the wifi at the hotel to get everything accomplished.

Now, the Tunnel Center (where she’s getting her Chemo) is local (literally four blocks away) but this doesn’t mean that I’ll have any kind of luck connecting to a network that allows some type of uploading based solely on the fact that there’s lord knows how many offices in this building and they’re all competing with the download time for BeeBee medicals internal file-sharing system that stretches amongst their entire network, including the imaging center right next door.

I guess I’ll just need to figure out everything when it happens, I can only hope that they’re super dumb (compared to Hopkins) and don’t have that kind of restriction because everyone in Delaware is a hell of a lot more trusting than they are in Baltimore.

My goal for tonight is to finish the edits on Site #1, so I can then get a few hours of sleep (hopefully at least 4) and then wake up to complete the remainder of Site #1 being as all of the PSD’s haven’t been moved into WordPress yet. My day tomorrow is completely booked worked wise, but at the same time I still have A LOT of cooking to do. I’m starting the crockpot around 11am, throwing in the meatballs/sausage around 1pm so they can cook for 6 or so hours to be done for dinner. I still have chicken to make before it goes bad, and quite a bit of baking to do because I was very unhappy with the bakery in the supermarket tonight. So with everything else going on I still have to make Fudge, White Chocolate Chip and Regular Chocolate Chip cookies, PLUS a Banana Nut Bread because, as I said, Karen is carbo-loading but I still need to figure out how to sneak some kind of fruits/veggies into her that aren’t just potatoes cause that’s way too much starch.

I just hope that the eggs I bought two weeks ago didn’t go bad already, and I really hope that we have butter in the house because I was stupid and didn’t check that when Sean and I went grocery shopping tonight. Crap I just remembered I need oil. I guess while I’m waking up with my first cup of coffee I’ll be dodging through the supermarket to pick up everything just to get back here in time to start the rest of my day.

Lord help me, even Music won’t calm this nerve down.

Time to get back to work so I can go to sleep.

I need a designer…

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

I’ve come to the conclusion that I need someone to build PSD’s for me on a some-what regular basis.  Trying to balance 8 different accounts just isn’t working out too well for me right now, especially when you factor in there are a few waiting in the wings that have absolutely no idea what they want and I need to take all of my photoshop efforts and push them to constant emails back and forth about what is liked, unliked, and ‘the cool thing cause I don’t know what I want’.  I’m about 10 minutes from ripping my hair out.

I hired Muir as an assistant to help out with the tedious bullcrap, but she doesn’t really know Photoshop other than for quick photo manipulation, building an entire PSD and labeling everything just isn’t an option right now.  Thankfully for her, she’s picked up another job with someone local in town so she’s able to get more of a paycheck being as the tedious gruntwork on my part (right now) is Photoshop based.

I’m thinking of going through my friends list on FB and Twitter and putting out an S.O.S. to anyone who knows what they’re doing.  I’m not looking for someone to code everything, but having an ounce of a code background (especially in WordPress, Joomla and Mangento) is a big help.

Any takers?  Email me.  krissy (at) agndesigns.net

Seriously?

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Today is one of those days where the only thing I can really think of saying is “WTF Mate?”.

I’m working on converting a site from tables to divs.  Now, while this may seem like an easy task (and typically is), I’ve found myself wanting to rip out my hair because I have absolutely no idea on where to start other than completely from scratch and implementing the remainder of the code.  Even ‘from scratch’ is proving to be difficult considering its a custom script where the creator obviously has NO idea on how to do anything.

The other “WTF” moment was a comment that I deleted from my pending queue, someone named “Mark” left a bit.ly URL for his website and what appears to be a valid email address noting that they’ve been here before, but lost the link (bull shit, bull shit, bull shit…yada yada) and informed me that my SEO is not up to par.  Dude, it’s a fucking personal site, are you serious?  #1, I could care less about SEO, and #2, if you type “Krissy” into Google I’m already on the first page, my PR rank is a 3 (no idea how I got that back), and I hardly ever, if at all, update…. so what’s the freaking point?

On a side note, I’m slowly coming along with My Portfolio and AcidGloss.net.  I’ve decided to keep ‘krissys-portfolio’ but the redirected domain is AGnDesignsNET.  The reason for this is it makes no sense to push everything to acidgloss.net when I do still wish to keep that as a blog.  So, agndesigns.net was available, I paid my $10, and now its just a matter of working in the content.

I’ve been working on some high profile clients, which would always look good in a portfolio, I’m also dumping all of the little BS templates that were in there for the longest time and really do not show off any kind of design skill other than my ability to whip something up in Photoshop in ten minutes and not think twice about it.  That’s bad for business, and a portfolio should utilize your best…and that’s what I fully intend to do.

The major rush behind getting everything back up and running is the pending write-ups that I need to do. I have at least 15-20 articles to write and have absolutely no ability to concentrate on my own stuff to get it done.  I’m hoping that within the next few days I can buckle down and accomplish that but it seems that every time I get some down time, someone kicks some work my way so thats an instant “nope, not gonna happen today” kind of downside.

Either way I’ll figure it out.  I also just needed to post here because it’s been well over a month, and while I do update twitter regularly, it’s not the same as sitting down for ten minutes and actually posting something here.

So now I’m off to continue working on the monstrocity that is client #3 for the day.

I need a cig 🙁

 

Gaining Inspiration…

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

I have to say that moving to a new host is giving me a whole field of inspiration.  I’m going to actively work on a new template this weekend as I really have nothing else to do.  I’m making it a point to setup one that not only allows me to properly integrate advertisors and personal links.  It’ll also give me the ability to get back into paid blogging.  I know that having a hiatus for the last year has kind of thrown me out of the running to bring in the money I was making before, but this doesn’t mean I can’t at least bring in a few hundred dollars a month just to insure that all of my bills are getting paid without having to worry about doing the full 80 pay-week to depend on income.

I’ve had a lot of requests lately for sponsored articles that are done personally through email.  I was also considering taking up an offer for a freelance writing position, but I’ll have to see how much time that would actually consume.  If they want articles written by 2pm on a Wednesday I’ll either have to drag my laptop to work or figure out a way to do it while I’m at work without having to take away from the endless wirlwind of shit going on in this place.  I find myself having loads of inspiration to do things while I’m sitting at work but by the time I get home at night I’m too tired to even look at my laptop.  I think I’ll just bring my notebook in with me so that I can doodle things out and hopefully find the time on the weekends to turn them into something pretty with Photoshop.

In any event, it’s about 11:30 in the morning and emails are really starting to pour in.  I think the insurance companies are trying to accomplish everything so they can leave early on Friday.  Of course this means that there will only be work for US but we have Monday off and my usual Sunday overtime will be spent cleaning things up instead of working on assignments since nothing can really be done until Tuesday anyway.